“I called it the
nine-headed beast…” – George Miller, on presiding over the 2016 Cannes Film
Festival Jury which comprised Valeria Golino, Kirsten Dunst, Arnaud
Despleschin, László Nemes, Katayoon Shahabi, Donald Sutherland, and Mads Mikkelsen
Summing up last year’s Cannes (my first time as press at the
Festival), I quoted the Un Certain Regard Jury president Isabella Rossellini’s
comment that the experience of the festival felt like taking “a flight over our
planet” that “any anthropologist” would envy. Rossellini’s description holds
good for this year, too, since the global scope of Cannes remains one of its principal
attractions, subverting the knee-jerk kvetching about diversity that’s now pretty
much de rigueur at any cultural event.
While Cannes 2016 boasted its share of duds and
disappointments (including Sean Penn’s thoroughly face-Palmed The Last
Face), the overall feeling was that that the festival offered one of the
strongest line-ups of recent years. (“Ah, but think of last year!” one
nostalgically-inclined critic said to me on the final day. “Mountains May Depart! Our
Little Sister! Son of Saul! Carol! Now, those were good movies!”)
In no particular order, my own favourites of this year’s festival were as
follows: Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s quietly
searing doc Hissein Habre: A Chadian Tragedy, Jim Jarmusch’s
perfectly pitched poem of a movie Paterson, Alain Guiraudie’s
superbly confounding Staying Vertical, Hirokazu Kore-eda beautifully
tender After The Storm, Spielberg’s supremely loveable
The BFG, Park Chan-wook’s dazzling The
Handmaiden, Pablo Larrain’s stylish,
surprising Neruda, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s exhilarating Aquarius,
and Juho Kuosmanen’s delightful The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli
Mäki, with a bonus point to Jeff Nichols’ flawed but admirably
low-key Loving.
These films spanned so many countries and cultures perspectives
and languages (including Gobblefunk, yeah) that they sum up, collectively, what
remains so great about Cannes: it’s reminder that film is an international
medium, a fact that can be too easily forgotten due to continued US dominance
of the marketplace. As Bilge Ebiri noted
at The Village Voice:
“It’s touching to see such hubbub over
things like three-hour Romanian art films, and to see a new Alain Guiraudie
movie on the massive screen of the Grand Theatre Lumiere.”
That being said, the uneasy sense that far too many of the
Competition films this year were by established Cannes pet auteurs, guaranteed
a place at the festival regardless of quality, was reflected in the decisions
of the George Miller-headed Jury, with the Palme d’or going to Ken Loach’s
I, Daniel Blake, the Grand Prix to Xavier Dolan’s
It’s Only The End of the World and the Jury Prize to Andrea
Arnold’s American Honey.
Mediocre or muddled efforts all, the award of the top prize to Loach
looked particularly like a politically rather than an artistically motivated
choice: a privileged Jury demonstrating their
sympathy with “the poor”. Strong to start (as a black comedy about bureaucracy)
but let down by its sentimental and schematic second half Loach’s movie may
have its heart in the right place but it’s far from the director’s finest work.
(The opening salvo from Pauline Kael’s Shoah review
- “Probably everyone will agree that the subject of a movie should not place it
beyond criticism” - has seldom seemed more relevant. )
Still, for all its shortcomings, I’d rather see I,
Daniel Blake take the Palme than Maren Ade’s bizarrely adored
father/daughter “comedy” Toni Erdmann, which many thought to
be a shoo-in for the top prize but that – thankfully – went away empty-handed. (In fact, Ade’s film was less favourably
received at its second showing than at its first, leading a friend who also
disliked it to suggest that the first press audience must have been placed
under some kind of collective hypnosis before the screening.)
There were surprises in the directing and acting categories,
particularly the win for Olivier Assayas (who shared the former prize with Cristian
Mungiu for Graduation) for his enjoyable but divisive Personal
Shopper and the Best Actress prize going Jaclyn Jose in Brillante
Mendoza’s Ma Rosa rather than to Sonia Braga for her
stunning display as the vibrant widow in Aquarius.
While it’s all too easy to complain about favourite films and
performances getting overlooked, the fact remains that the competitive element
in these events is generally a farce, and responses to the same films differ so
much that it’s hard to see how the Jury ever reaches any kind of
consensus. Moreover, in the case of
Cannes it feels like the Jury – which Miller likened (affectionately, one
hopes...) to a “nine-headed beast” - are being further compromised by their
inability to award a film in more than one category.
(Meanwhile, responses to the verdict can seem as weird as
the verdicts themselves. Nick James’s theory in Sight & Sound
that the amount of actors on the Jury may
have led to “theatre-based films” being honoured is particularly baffling given that
only It’s Only the End of the World and Farhadi's The Salesman
which nods at Arthur Miller, have any theatrical roots at all.)
For me, the best antidote to the Cannes hype and hustle came in
the shape of the last film I saw at the festival: Kuosmanen’s The
Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki, which was the winner of the Un
Certain Regard prize. A black-and-white Finnish boxing film, that, in its
gentleness and wry humour, soon
establishes itself as the anti-Raging Bull the film’s focus
on a fighter (Jarkko Lahti) who’s more concerned with love than the limelight made
the movie feel more subversive than any of the brasher, blunter, more overtly “political”
efforts presented at Cannes this year. It’s to be hoped that the Festival will continue
to open up to more fresh voices and visions such as Kuosmanen’s, rather than
falling back on favourite, established names, when it reaches its milestone 70th
year in 2017.
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